“Before you, he wouldn’t even take an aspirin for a headache,” Denise McGovern said to Henson, referring to her son, according to the newspaper. “... He was sent to you by his physician. You made him into an addict.”

The Eagle quoted McGovern’s wife Burgundy Castillo as saying, “No sentence will bring Nick back to us, but if Steven Henson had treated Nick instead of enabling him, he would have still been with us today.”

Henson said he armed himself with a handgun when he saw patients “because of the clientele he deals with,” the paper reported in 2017, citing court documents.

“We are dealing with an epidemic,” said Wichita U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister. “Nationwide, more than 70,000 Americans died in 2017 from drug overdoses. That is more than all the American casualties during the war in Vietnam.”